"When I came home and saw how I’d ended up playing a part in other people’s journeys, it really inspired me."
Where previously the youth of Dublin might not have thought of their home city as a place that could produce rappers, perhaps now they look at Rejjie and think, ‘If he can, I can too.’ Is that a role that he’s embraced at all? “Yeah, it took me a while though,” he says, “It made me feel very self- conscious at the start. But when I came home and saw how I’d ended up playing a part in other people’s journeys, it really inspired me. I’m a lot more involved in things going on in Dublin than I used to be. Growing up, I never had any musical figures to look up to, but I’m not afraid of anything and I want people to take that away from what I’m doing, to know that they can be fearless too.”
Rejjie talks with real warmth and enthusiasm about the “new energy” of a city that he says is becoming ever-more multicultural, connected and open-minded. But while it’s a totally different town to the one that he grew up in, perhaps the best new thing you can realise about where you’re from is just how great it was in the first place – an epiphany aided for Rejjie by his time away and the chance it gave him to see his home from a distance, afresh. “When I think of all the great things to have come out of Dublin, it serves as a reminder of how great this place is, and how I don’t have to go somewhere else to be who I want to be,” he says. “It all starts with your own place.”
